Special Delivery
by bissek
Summary: The Viceroyal Palace is thrown into an uproar when a parcel sent by the Black Knights arrives in the mail. What does Zero hope to gain by sending a package to Princess Cornelia?


Disclaimer: I do not own Code Geass

Special Delivery

by bissek

The Viceroyal palace of Area 11 received a large amount of mail every day. Most of it was official paperwork. Some of it was personal mail for people who found it more convenient for their mail to be delivered to their workplace rather than their home for some reason. Since the Viceroyal palace was both home and workplace to Cornelia Li Britannia, Second Princess of Britannia and Vicereine of Area 11, all of her mail, both personal and work related, was shipped to the palace.

Not that she opened most of it herself. The staff in the mail room was provided with a list of parties who could be reasonably expected to be sending her letters and packages. Anything from someone outside that list was shunted to a group of staffers to examine. Only if they deemed something in that pile of mail to be interesting or important would it be sent on to the Vicereine's desk.

One thing that arrived in the mail was immediately deemed to be extremely interesting. Upon opening the package that had been addressed to the Vicereine, he found that it contained two smaller packages bound together, each of which had the birdlike sigil of the Black Knights emblazoned on them. The staffer immediately called security.

Worrying that the Black Knights had managed to find a way to get a bomb past the explosives sniffers they used on the contents of the mail truck daily, the security officers carefully examined the packages and found nothing. After rechecking several times and still finding nothing, they carefully opened the packages. One of them contained a small plush doll of Zero. The other contained a cake.

Two teams were formed to examine the items. One team focused on the plush doll. They scanned it for explosives. They searched over it for spy cameras or hidden microphones. They tested every square inch of the surface to see if the fabric contained any kind of poison or drug that could be absorbed through skin contact. They literally tore the doll to pieces searching for any kind of trap that could spring on the person handling it. They found nothing

The other team tested the cake, certain that Zero had planned to poison or drug the Vicereine. They tested for poisons. They tested for binary toxins that could be triggered later. They tested for drugs. They checked for bacterial infections. They even tested for anything that might possibly trigger a medicinal or food based allergic reaction if the Vicereine was to eat any of it. The only thing they found was trace quantities of cyanide that came from the crushed almonds sprinkled on the frosting, and there wasn't enough of them to harm a grown woman, even if she ate all of them at once.

After a week of fruitless searches that destroyed virtually all of the cake through various tests and reduced the doll to scraps of fabric and fluff, someone finally found something. A sealed plastic envelope had been concealed beneath the cake, unnoticed until that point because it was almost the same color as the plate and smeared with crumbs and frosting that further camouflaged it. After further tests, they opened the envelope. Then they contacted the Vicereine to report what they had found.

"Well?" The Vicereine demanded.

"Zero left a note with his little package, Your Highness." The head of the team reported, handing her the envelope. Cornelia pulled open the unsealed envelope, and read the card inside.

_Happy Birthday, Your Highness!_

_Don't worry. You don't need to send a return present on my birthday. The entertainment I'll have gotten from watching your people try to figure out what sinister purpose I was hoping to achieve by sending you a birthday present is gift enough._

_Zero_

Cornelia stared in shock at the birthday card as she realized that the packages had arrived at the palace on her birthday. The last time the leader of a group of rebellious Numbers had remembered her birthday, they had sent a troupe of suicide bombers. She'd never had a terrorist send her a perfectly innocent present before. Could he have really just wanted to see half of her security teams scramble around after nothing for his own personal amusement?

Then she saw it. The real reason why Zero had left his mark on the packages. He had wanted it to be found alright, but not for the sake of humor.

"Get your people sent out to the ports, now!" She ordered. "This was a diversion. Zero gave us a red herring to focus the attention of all our security teams on the palace. He must have been smuggling supplies into the country while we were all staring at a cake. I want to know what he managed to sneak in, how of it much he has, and where he got it from, _now!_"

"At once, your Highness!" The leader responded, then he started issuing his own orders to his men. Within minutes, the teams were on their way out of the palace to start investigating, leaving the Vicereine with the sole slice of cake that hadn't been destroyed for chemical analysis. As she looked at the cake, Cornelia had to wonder. The exact date of her birthday was public record. Anyone could look it up without any effort at all. But how had he known what her favorite kind of cake was? And what was with the doll? Only a handful of people knew of her collection of plush toys. Was he trying to tell her how thoroughly he had infiltrated her staff as a subtle threat?

Cornelia swept from the room. She needed to have a word with her intelligence office. There was a serious leak in the Viceroyal palace, and she needed to have it plugged immediately.

* * *

"So. The Britannians have started a series of mass investigations at the ports and in the palace, have they Ougi? Good. I was counting on that. Contact Kyoto and inform them that the preconditions for the plan I laid out to them two weeks ago have been met. I will explain the Black Knight's role in the operation at our meeting tomorrow night." Lelouch turned off the phone and removed the voice altering device, his lips curled in a triumphant smile.

"So, what was the purpose of that package you sent to Cornelia, anyway?" C.C. asked.

"It's simple, really. Cornelia is convinced that I sent the package to distract her from something. She's now trying to figure out what that something was. However, what she missed is that while all her top people were distracted by my little joke due to it being a high-profile potential threat, in terms of overall manpower, the overall impact was negligible. But the effort to figure out what I hoped to gain from a harmless prank will tie down the bulk of her investigators for at least a month before they figure out they're chasing shadows. And while they're busy searching for something that isn't there, we can operate freely.

"In addition to that, I've introduced a great deal of mistrust into her organization. Since they believe that I sent the package to pull many of Cornelia's top investigators away from their regular posts in order to slip something else past their watch, they have to wonder if I was certain that I could do so because I had compromised some of the people who weren't reassigned. They'll have to do thorough and highly time-consuming investigations into every single person who they didn't tap to either investigate the package or track it's point of origin. Cornelia will have to do that with her own staff as well, as I included a few hints that I had a source who knew her personally in the package. And even though they won't find anything, lack of evidence isn't always evidence of lack, is it? There will be suspicions against some of the people investigated for a long time to come, hindering my enemy's ability to work as a well organized unit.

"All in all, I think that's a very good return for the cost of a cake and a hand-made toy, don't you?"

"And was that the _only_ reason you sent that package to your sister?" C.C. asked coyly.

"Of course not. Cornelia was one of the few siblings that I actually liked back when I lived in New Pendragon. What kind of brother would I be if I didn't send her a present on her birthday?"

* * *

A/N: This started out as a snippet I created to be used by any interested party in their own CG fic. Since nobody has used it in the two years since I wrote the original version, I decided to edit it a bit and turn it into a one-shot.


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